


Patience

by sesquipedaily



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Childhood Friends, F/F, autistic!Luna, homeschooled luna au, nonverbal!Luna, really pretty close to canon in terms of chain of events
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:33:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6535297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sesquipedaily/pseuds/sesquipedaily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'It was not the sort of afternoon to go visiting a girl with a funereal stare who hadn’t spoken in two years.'</p>
<p>Or, the AU with autistic, primarily nonverbal Luna who is homeschooled until she's 14, and the growth of her friendship  with one Ginny Weasley. Will be updated regularly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was not the sort of afternoon to go visiting a girl with a funereal stare who hadn’t spoken in two years. 

Ginny looked up. No clouds, a vast bowl of blue above her, looking higher than she’d ever seen it. She frowned. This was a Quidditch afternoon. If she had her way, she’d be kicking off on George’s old broom right now, not minding that it might shatter under her at the slightest inflection of a breeze, lungs full of sky. 

But she was not on George’s broom. She was willing her mother’s potatoes to burn under her watch as she stood in the long shadow of the Lovegoods’ shambling pseudo-house. 

‘Poor girl,’ Molly had said. ‘I always said she’d turn out simple. He feeds her all those funny little turnips. It’s hardly brain food. And with Pandora gone, rest her soul – well, Ginny, she’ll be wanting a friend, won’t she?’ And Ginny had said that Luna wanting a friend was all well and good, provided that it didn’t get in the way of Ginny’s wanting to not spend her summer sitting across from a girl who was about as interactive as a pebble. And Molly had said that was nice, dear, but she’d be going to the Lovegoods’ tomorrow, and that was all that would be said on the matter. And Ginny had said she wouldn’t go even if Molly got the entire Harpies team to take her to the door. And Molly had given Ginny a look.

And so Ginny had gone to the Lovegoods’.

Xenophilius waved her in from the too-squat doorframe. ‘Hello, Ginevra,’ he said. ‘You’ll be here for Luna.’ 

‘It’s Ginny, actually,’ she muttered, as she trudged after him up a flight of stairs that wound round and round like the whorls of a snail shell. She got her hair tangled in a low-hanging mobile comprised of rotating, gently fizzing plant shoots that smelled distinctly of cod, and wished she was back home. 

Luna was standing in the bedroom at the top of the house. Everything about her curled in on itself. Hands fisted, spine folded, twisting away from Ginny into the darkness of a room padded on every available surface with hideously clashing scarves. Ginny swallowed. 

‘You’ll want me out of the way, I’m sure,’ Xenophilius said. He walked across the room, stood directly in front of Luna, and blinked slowly at her. ‘You’ll be good, won’t you?’ Luna inhaled, a ragged barely-breath. She blinked back. ‘That’s my best frond-smillid. I’ll call you down for tea as and when.’ 

Xenophilius trailed his violently green flares out the door, and was gone. 

Luna looked over Ginny’s corners with forensic care. The chewed cuffs of her jumper. The scabs on her ankles. She couldn’t fit all of Ginny in her eyes at once, so she catalogued her by segments, and Ginny stood, watching, being watched, unmoving and unnerved.

After a minute about as long, Ginny thought, as the main sequence period of a stable star, she said ‘hello’ and wished she hadn’t. Luna blinked at her, in alarm or acknowledgement, Ginny wasn’t sure, and let the silence thicken between them. 

Several more minutes passed before Luna went to fetch a pencil from the top of a drawer that Ginny hadn’t registered in all its scarf-y swaddlings. Luna knelt down on the floor, found a small strip of uncovered white wall, and began to write. When Ginny didn’t follow, she pointed insistently at the wall until Ginny knelt, the space between them unbreachable, to read. In erratic, wandering cursive Luna had written: ‘Do you want to play Concoct?’ 

Playing Concoct with Luna was complicated. There were several potion ingredient cards in Luna’s pack – bearded snuffgrass, fang-rot essence, powdered crumple-horned snorkack toenails – that Ginny didn’t recognise from Bill and Charlie’s old set. At first she assumed that this was just a more recent edition of the game, but when she looked more closely at the detail of the delicately twining borders of vine-leaves, the tiny marks where a pencil had slipped outside the lines on the illustrations, the relative lightness of the cards in her hand, she began to wonder if they were from the pack at all.

‘Did you make these?’ Ginny asked. Luna blinked at her, slowly, and this time Ginny felt certain it was in assent. ‘They’re very good.’ Luna’s hands flickered a little holding the cards. 

In a few more turns, Ginny had acquired all the ingredients for a full concoction. She laid her hand down and smiled as imitation tickling potion smoke, pink and fizzing, bloomed up from the pile. Luna looked at the cards, frowned, and began to deal for another round. 

Ginny didn’t stay for tea. Xenophilius had cooked up a sensory assault that resembled nothing better than a carbonated swamp, and Luna was looking tired. She was halfway across the first field on the walk back home when she heard the swish of footsteps behind her weaving through the high summer grass. 

She turned around, and Luna was before her, shifting her weight from her toes to her heels, eyes down, hair scattered, holding out her hand. In it Ginny could see, slightly crumpled, the corner of Luna’s crumple-horned snorkack card. 

‘Is this for me?’ she asked. Luna pushed out her hand farther, a demand, not an invitation. Ginny took the card, smoothed it, and put it safe in the back pocket of her jeans. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘it’s lovely.’

It only took a moment for Luna to turn and dart back across the grass, and it was a moment too quick for Ginny to catch hold of. Years later, when she tried to remember it, Luna would slip in and out on the edges of her vision, the light around her mercurial, never quite still enough to unblur the memory. 

* * *

‘How is she, dear?’ said Mrs Weasley at dinner, ladling out trifle onto Ginny’s plate. ‘Still not… well, at least Xenophilius is good to her, in his way. Poor thing. It was sweet of you to go.’ 

Ginny sat silent, turning the card over and over under the table. She wanted to tell Mrs Weasley that nothing that afternoon had seemed especially sweet, and that Luna certainly hadn’t seemed especially poor. She wanted to tell Mrs Weasley that Luna was a sore loser, made beautiful drawings, liked the dark, believed in oddities, that everything seemed both very, very fast and very, very slow when Ginny was with her, that she hadn’t thought quiet could take up so much space before, that Luna had given her her card, that Ginny didn’t understand her at all. But she said none of this, and she slipped the card back into her pocket. 

‘You don’t have to go back, of course,’ Molly said ‘It’s really just about making her feel there’s… people around her. Her own age. And, well, she knows that now. So you’ve done very well, dear. We’ll see Xenophilius at the Finchburrows’ wedding, anyway.’

Ginny made a noncommittal noise and cleared her plate. The next afternoon, she walked back across the fields, and Luna met her at the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This takes place one year after the events of the first chapter.

Ginny had never been fond of the dark. She wouldn’t say she was afraid – it was just that the dark had always held a heaviness for her, a tendency to smother, not shelter. She did not fear the dark, she resented it for stripping away the stimulation of daylight, and leaving something altogether more nebulous. But sitting in Luna’s room, the dim lamp behind them casting strange shadows on the wall from the fluttering of their hands, making them look like many-formed sea creatures moving darkly underwater – Ginny wasn’t sure she minded it so much. Once, she asked Luna why she covered her windows, and Luna had said that the light pressed on her eyes, and Ginny hadn’t understood, but she nodded anyway. And so she had had to acclimatize.

Wizarding sign was largely done one-handed, to facilitate wand use with the other hand. The movements were small and precise – one expansive sweep of the wrist could, in an under-practised wizard, produce a smoking hole in next door’s wall. Even Luna occasionally sparked when she flapped. Ginny, who danced like a tornado and was no longer permitted near Mrs Weasley’s best chinaware, at first found confining her movements as easy as confining her breathing. But Luna was patient, and she found a slow kind of pleasure in repeating the movements with Ginny, watching Ginny’s hands slip into time with her own by increments, until she could see herself perfectly reflected in the girl sitting across from her. Ginny had learned to sign, and Luna’s room did not feel so quiet any more.

This was Ginny and Luna’s second summer together. Sometimes they went outside to lie in the field, the air sweet with indolence. Luna would stare up at the sky, pointing out each curious-looking bird and telling Ginny that it emerged from the bottom of the Hogwarts Lake once every four years to seek a mate, or that it could imitate most of the noises and functions of a kettle. Ginny would watch her, splitting leaves of grass down the middle, uncharacteristically soft in her hazy content. But Luna didn’t like how the grass needled her back, and it always made Ginny dreadfully sleepy, so they spent most of the time in the little turret room, building stories taller than God, playing cards, wondering at each other’s intricacies. 

Sometimes when Ginny got up the stairs Luna would be reading, or drawing, or checking the carpet for gnome eggs, and she wouldn’t turn round for Ginny at all. Other days, Ginny would find her sitting perfectly still with her chin on her knees, barely skimming the surface of her breaths, like one drowning. On these days Ginny would take care with Luna. She would fetch some old Quibbler editions and a handful of dirigible plums from Xenophilius (they tasted like crab apples, sour enough to strip the enamel off your teeth) and sit on the bed, pretending to read, watching Luna until her breathing slowed. 

The Weasleys were baffled. ‘I won’t say it isn’t nice of you to go, dear, but you can take charity too far,’ Molly had said. Fred and George told her that, with all the afternoons she was spending at the Lovegoods’, her Quidditch practice was slipping, and she’d never make the Gryffindor team if she kept this up. Sometimes Ron would sit silent at the dinner table, eyes dim, gaping like a fish, and when Molly asked if he’d taken ill, he’d tell them he was only ‘doing a Luna.’ Or at least he did, until Ginny’s under-the-table kicking acquired such accuracy and force through practice that his legs throbbed purple for a week. Ginny bit the inside of her cheek and told herself she didn’t, wouldn’t mind. 

She certainly didn’t mind enough to stop her from make her way over to the Lovegoods’ on an incongruously cold July evening. This was Luna’s favourite time, Ginny knew: when the sky began to flicker with unfamiliar light, and the outlines of the mountains in the distance started to shift into each other, forming a vast, shadowy clot on the horizon. Luna told her there were giants there, living in caves the size of asteroid craters, and by night Ginny half-believed her. 

Up in Luna’s room, Ginny’s hands moved with an intensity that Luna wasn’t quite sure she liked. ‘Guess who’s in our house right now,’ she signed. 

‘Lots of people are in your house. I imagine Mr Weasley’s home by now.’

‘No, I mean, who else might be in our house.’

‘Percy will be there. I do like Percy.’ 

‘No, Luna, I mean someone who isn’t usually around.’

Luna frowned for a minute, then: ‘Oh! I believe I saw a trail of migrating mandrakes going across the field yesterday! Do be careful if you’ve got one inside. They’re very clever thieves.’

‘I don’t think so, but I’ll tell mum to watch out. Look, I’ll give you a clue.’ In the air, she spelled out ‘H.P.’ with one finger. 

‘That’s a kind of muggle sauce. Daddy bought some back from the Quibbler printers in London. It’s quite horrible. Doesn’t Mrs Weasley make nice food?’

Ginny sighed and said aloud: ‘Luna, no, look, it’s Harry Potter!’ 

Luna flinched a little, unaccustomed to the sudden noise. She told herself that Ginny wasn’t shouting, Ginny was talking, and talking was to be expected, even if the words rattling round her eardrum felt more like an invasion than a conversation. She breathed deep, all the way into the ground, like Xenophilius had taught her, and signed: ‘Yes, he’s Ronald’s friend, isn’t he?’

‘I mean, he might be, unless Ron’s actually kidnapped him, but he’s also, you know, the Boy Who Lived!’

Luna fidgeted with the tassels of the blanket she had pulled over her knees. ‘I don’t think he enjoys that very much.’

‘Luna, he’s got more magic on his forehead than I’ll ever be able to get through a wand, there’s boys copying his hair, and Ron says he eats free at the Leaky Cauldron.’ 

‘The Leaky Cauldron isn’t especially nice. And in the Prophet, everyone’s always squishing round him, there’s cameras pointing in his face, people asking and asking and asking him for stories or pictures or to touch his head, and I think it’d make him feel very… itchy.’

Ginny looked at her, head to one side, eyes soft with something Luna couldn’t quite make out in the half-light. ‘Not everyone minds those things, Luna.’

Luna tugged at the thread of the tassel and thought about her fifth birthday, a tempest of voices breaking against her as she rocked in a corner, the renting of the wrapping paper cracking across her skull like a stunning spell, unfamiliar hands swarming her food. Her mother had said she didn’t need to have another birthday ever again, if she didn’t want to. 

‘Do you like him?’

‘Do I like him? He’s Harry Potter!’ 

Luna blinked, confused. She signed again: ‘Do you like him?’

Ginny shrugged. ‘Everyone likes Harry Potter.’

As far as Luna knew, Ginny didn’t tend to like people. She often didn’t like Mrs Weasley, never stayed to dinner with Xenophilius, and certainly wasn’t fond of Ronald. But she had said that she liked Luna, that she liked her stories and the way twigs always got caught in her hair and how excited she got about Christmas even in the middle of August and how she hummed to herself when she thought no one was watching. She had said that she liked Luna, and Luna had believed her. 

But if Ginny could like this Harry Potter after knowing him a day, she supposed it couldn’t be long before she was telling him all of her favourite things about him, too.

When Luna lay down to sleep that night, she felt a new sharpness curdle in her stomach. Over the night it settled there, fraying the edges of her nerves, and she was too afraid to give it a name.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place in the summer after Ginny's first year. TW: descriptions of trauma (specifically Ginny's, following Riddle's possession of her during the school year).

Luna had expected Ginny to come back changed after her first year of Hogwarts, but she hadn’t expected her to come back like this. 

She didn’t come to see Ginny off from Platform 93/4 in September. Xenophilius had warned her about the inexorable current of human activity that would tug Luna a little further under with each passing train, about the lights and the heat and the too-much-too-loud-too-often of it all. So Luna had stayed, and Ginny had gone off to Hogwarts alone. 

Through the year Luna let herself sink into a comfortable sort of loneliness. She worked through The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 with her mother’s old wand, scribbled her own annotations in the margin of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and made paper cranes out of A History of Magic. Xenophilius’ plimpy stew tasted faintly of the residue from Luna’s kitchen-pan potion experiments all winter. Really, Luna thought, why bother about the sorting ceremony, or the Christmas feast, or secret passageways and moving staircases? She had everything that mattered about Hogwarts there with her in her room. 

Some days, she believed it.

When she thought about Ginny, it was with the grief-edged quietude that we remember the long-dead. Ginny was lost in a flurry of charms quizzes and afternoons by the lake and newer, louder, friends. She only ever wrote to Luna late at night, when sleep curled around the rest of the castle like a sea mist, three-line scrawls on the back of her transfiguration homework. ‘There’s a squid here!!! Fred says you can ride it at full moon.’ ‘Bet you’re missing me. Bet you’re missing me right now.’ ‘I think you’d like Hagrid.’ Halfway through the year, the letters stopped altogether. Luna didn’t worry. Ginny was allowed to be busy. People were, at Hogwarts. 

When Ginny came home for the summer, Luna didn’t think she’d be seeing very much of her at all. She certainly didn’t think she would find Ginny at her door, bunched up in one of Bill’s old jumpers, the same day the Hogwarts Express pulled back into King’s Cross. 

Luna had spent a lot of time noticing Ginny. The slight kink in her fringe that she could never quite brush out. The redness of her knuckles. The spray of freckles scattered down her collarbone. She had learned Ginny by fractions, accumulating scraps, every detail a collector’s piece, to wonder at again under each shift of the light. 

But looking at her now Luna stood struck. She couldn’t map the details she knew best when the whole was so alchemically altered. She did not recognise Ginny in these hunched shoulders, these watchful eyes, these fingernails bitten below the quick. Every part of her was jagged with fear, and Luna did not want to stand too close. 

‘Hello,’ Ginny signed. Luna swallowed. Blinked. Breathed. Swallowed. ‘Hello, Ginny,’ she said aloud, the words halting, stubborn, slow from her tongue. She had been practising for a week. Ginny did not even look up. 

Luna did not know how long it was before she signed: ‘What do you want to do?’ 

Ginny stood and thought, tried to still the twitch in her hand before she signed back: ‘Can we play Concoct?’

* * *

Ginny didn’t spend much time at home that summer. Mrs Weasley’s kindness suffocated her. Her father sat fumbling for words across the dinner table, ruffling her hair in an awkward benediction, withdrawing his hand quicker than he ever had before. Fred and George moved their charms experiments out into the back garden, so as not to disturb her as she sat staring around her room, watching notebook pages bubble out from the wallpaper, writing themselves black with lines upon lines of copperplate script. The Weasleys moved around her with all the sombreness of mourners gathering at a new grave, eyes cast down, speaking low. 

Ginny was both stronger and weaker than any of them supposed. None of them knew about the dreams, but they also didn’t know how she rose before anyone else in the house to wash her face in the downstairs bathroom, scrubbing away the traces of the last night’s rememberings. None of them knew, or cared to know, how she was trying to make herself better. To them she was shatterable, a thing on the verge, not a girl who was breaking over and over and over, knitting the fragments back into a semblance of a whole with each new sharding. They edged around her with a care that stung, and under its weight Ginny could barely breathe. 

So she went to the Lovegoods’ instead. 

She couldn’t remember when she stopped going home in the evenings, or when Luna started building a nest of scarves on the floor to wind herself up in while Ginny lay sleepless on Luna’s bed, or when Luna had said Ginny could take the bed in the first place. On several mornings Ginny found herself having shifted to the floor at some point in the night, Luna’s straggly hair trailing across Ginny’s pillow in the thin light of dawn. Luna always woke first. She would get up and fetch Ginny gurdyroot tea, and Ginny would gulp it down, because the quicker she swallowed it the less the taste lingered on her tongue, and Luna would be pleased that Ginny always had such an appetite for this most perception-heightening of hot drinks. 

Luna never assumed, as far as Ginny was concerned. If Ginny was sad, she asked if she wanted her there. If Ginny was scared, she asked her what of. If Ginny wasn’t doing much of anything at all, just looking, looking, looking at the walls, Luna asked what was so interesting, and if she had spotted a Crawling Banderbale making its way up to the ceiling, because they really were rather rare. Luna did not treat Ginny as a curse unspoken, heavy in the throat, pressing on the mind to be given voice but always to be smothered. Ginny was hurt, and Luna wasn’t going to be of any help sitting and fretting about her in the quiet. With Luna, Ginny did not have to tuck herself into a corner or move out of anyone’s way. She was there, and Luna saw her, not an inconvenience or a gap in the conversation, but a girl who was allowed to be afraid.

* * * 

It was that summer that Luna decided she was going to go to Hogwarts.

If this was what was happening to Ginny as Luna whiled away the year in her room, she wouldn’t mind about Platform 93/4, or about becoming submerged in the particular kind of quiet that comes from being the only one not talking in a roomful of noise, or about having to sleep with people she didn’t know around her. She would blink, and breathe, and smile if she had to, and she would sit out the years with Ginny under her watch. There would be Care of Magical Creatures. There would be ghosts – Luna had always wanted to meet one. There would be a castle brimming with the accumulated stories of the centuries, layer upon layer, like rock strata, for Luna to come to know. But most importantly, there would be Ginny, and Ginny would be safe. 

Luna did not tell Xenophilius. He worried when she went out beyond the third field on the way to the barely-town of Ottery St. Catchpole. This would be Luna’s secret. And she was an exceptionally good secret-keeper. 

* * * 

They held Luna’s sorting by the stream out back of the garden one evening. 

That summer, Ginny and Luna spent more time outside than ever before. There were days when confinement, especially in the gloom of Luna’s room, made Ginny still with fright, and the faintest suggestion of movement out of the corner of her eye sent her twitching. Then they would go outside, and Luna would find Ginny foxgloves for her hair, and Ginny would dare Luna to eat toadstools.

So they found themselves by the stream in the dwindling light, stretched out on their backs, Ginny laughing as Luna told her that gnomes could never be without their hats even on a warm day. They’d been trading chocolate frog packs between them all afternoon (Ginny brought them with her from home, to supplement Xenophilius’ terrible cooking). Luna watched the last frog scamper across the grass – she never did eat them, she just liked to see them move. Then, her eyes became clouded. Her hands shifted, alive with fretful energy. Ginny noticed, because Ginny always noticed.

‘What’s wrong?’ She signed. 

Luna turned to face her. ‘I’m afraid I might not be very good in Gryffindor.’

Ginny frowned. ‘No one has to be in Gryffindor.’

‘But you’re in Gryffindor.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then.’

Ginny thought for a moment. ‘You don’t have to keep your friends all in one house. You don’t even have to like whoever ends up in your dormitory. I hexed Vanessa Nomura two weeks in when she kept saying that Transfiguration was “beyond the Muggleborn mind.”’

‘I’d like to be brave, though.’ 

‘You can be lots of things at once. How boring would you be if you were just brave all the time?’

‘I suppose.’ 

Luna stretched on the cooling grass. She signed carefully, her movements slow with a rare uncertainty. ‘Where would I be, then?’ 

‘What, your house?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

Ginny grinned wide. ‘Sit up,’ she signed. Luna sat up. Ginny rose to walk behind her, taking off her cardigan. ‘I’m going to put this on your head, ok?’ she said aloud. Luna nodded, and Ginny placed the cardigan over her like a shroud. Luna smiled into the darkness. 

‘Now,’ said Ginny, in a voice that croaked with the dust of a thousand years sat on a shelf in the Hogwarts’ Headmaster’s office, ‘I, the Sorting… Cardigan, will surely find the place for you. I shall peer into the very deeps of your mind, don’t doubt it, there’s magic in this wool yet – don’t laugh, Luna, this is serious – hmm, where to put you, where to put you?’

Luna sat still as the August air around them, listening, absorbed in the newness of Ginny’s distorted voice. ‘Well, there’s certainly a fine mind here,’ Ginny continued, ‘A fine mind, a quick mind, quick to notice, quick to… observe. We ought to think about Ravenclaw. But what’s this? Bravery, too? Running out in a storm to catch Falling Snickerseeds? That is quite in line with Gryffindor house, quite in line… And loyalty to boot! Perhaps a Slytherin, then – oh, come on, Luna, they’re not that bad – or, if not, the gentle Hufflepuff? You are quite the young problem, Miss Lovegood…’

Ginny stopped short. She remembered Luna telling her about all the things that lived at the core of stars, drawing her the shapes that she’d dreamed in the night, reading to her from muggle magic stories – King Arthur and his knights, princesses in the forest, children born golden in rags – and showing her how they were woven into the tales of their own world. She remembered Luna seeing as no one else saw, her mind foaming and darting like the stream that ran beside them, and she wondered how she had ever considered anything else. 

She knelt before Luna and pulled the cardigan off her head. Luna blinked in the grey-blue light. ‘Is that the Sorting over, then?’ she signed. 

‘Ravenclaw,’ Ginny signed back. ‘You’d definitely be in Ravenclaw.’ 

Luna frowned. ‘Definitely not Gryffindor?’ 

‘Hey, come on, they’ve got the better tower. And their student drama’s really good. Weird, but good. This fifth-year did a thing where she folded herself up in a self-watering plant for three days in the corner of the Great Hall – she said it was a performance piece, apparently, but I still don’t know what it was she was performing –’

Luna was looking down at her knees, yanking out hunks of grass from the soil, the way she did when she got upset. Ginny held her palms up and waited for Luna to fit her hands perfectly over them. This was their touch, and it was ‘I’m here,’ and ‘I’m ok,’ and ‘I’m sorry’ all at once. 

‘Luna, I don’t like you because you’re in some house. I don’t like you because you might end up in my common room. I don’t. I don’t. I like you because you’re Luna. And Luna is lovely, actually.’

Luna was quiet for the rest of that night. But as the summer wore on, and Ginny slipped into sleep easier and easier with Luna’s stories at her ear, she decided she wouldn’t mind being a Ravenclaw so much, if it meant she could make Ginny smile at the things that rose up from her mind. 

Some time later, sitting on a stool in the middle of the Great Hall, Luna wouldn’t even let the Hat deliberate. ‘I’m a Ravenclaw,’ she said, ‘I have it on very good authority.’ And that, the Hat agreed, was that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during the summer after Ginny's second year at Hogwarts. TW: mentions of ableism; slight mentions of grief and dysphoria.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so very sorry this was so late updating: I've been dealing with exams and personal issues over the last two months, but I'm glad to get back to writing this now! This chapter is a little longer than previous ones - hope you enjoy it!

_Dearly regarded writers and editors of the Daily Prophet,_

_I am writing in response to your article of the 3 rd July, titled ‘Nonverbal spells – fancy frippery or magical menace?’ Firstly, this is not a good title for a serious piece of magical analysis, and I would recommend that next time Ms Skeeter choose something more directly addressing the subject, such as ‘When will the Daily Prophet give a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean about wizarding access needs?’ _

_In your article, you argue that an ability for nonverbal magic is used by some wizards to falsely claim that their spellwork is of a higher standard than that of their peers or colleagues, creating friction in the community. But this is simply not true. I have known several bad wizards – including myself – who have been able to master nonverbal spells. I find that the trick is to chew a bit of Alazear’s knotweed with breakfast. It enhances the wizard’s skill with extra-verbal communication, as well as being a useful indigestion cure (see The Quibbler, issue 467, for more information)._

_You also argue that, in an age where duelling is increasingly frowned upon as barbaric, any wizard who wishes to learn how to cast spells in silence must be ‘a sneaking straggle of snotslime, with an eye on his enemy’s back’ (your words). However, the fact is that most all wizards wanting to learn nonverbal magic have no intention of using it to harm others – and I must say that your comparison to the practices of early Death Eaters is inappropriate and insensitive. Mainly, nonverbal spells are a convenient solution to dilemmas arising from everyday life, for instance, needing to summon a cup of tea from the counter while chewing a large mouthful of toast._

_Moreover, your article completely ignores the fact that nonverbal magic is a necessity for many wizards – those who are hard of hearing, for example, and those who otherwise struggle to process or produce spoken language. Learning nonverbal spells not only provides such wizards with the invaluable skills that they need to function in the magical community, but also reminds wizards without these access needs that there are some in our world who struggle with the prioritization of spoken language to achieve basic tasks._

_I and others like me are not Death-Eaters-in-training just because nonverbal magic is our default, and the Daily Prophet would do well to remember this._

_Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a lovely day,_

_Luna Lovegood, The Rookery, Aged 13_ _ 1 _ _/ 4_

Ginny read the letter over, muttering the words aloud to herself, sitting on a stool in the Lovegood’s violently yellow kitchen. Luna watched her until Ginny put the letter back down on the table.

‘I like the first paragraph,’ Ginny signed.

‘That’s because you wrote it.’

‘That’s true,’ she grinned. ‘But I still don’t think you should tell them to have a lovely day.’

‘It’s polite.’

‘They’re not polite.’

‘Well, maybe it’ll rub off.’

‘I think Rita Skeeter’s immune.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t send it after all.’

Ginny looked at Luna, at her eyes ocean-wide with concern, nibbling a corner of her thumbnail. ‘You know we should, Luna. Come on! If they publish it, you’ll be famous before you even get to Hogwarts.’

Luna frowned. She did not want to be famous. Her mother had been famous, pulsing in death with a symphony of lights visible to every house in the village, and look what it had done for her.

‘Have you talked to your dad about that, by the way?’

Luna blinked, her mind still mired in her mother. ‘About what?’

‘What do you mean “about what”? About Hogwarts, silly!’

Luna looked down, counting the strands of grass in the mat on the floor. ‘No,’ she signed, ‘not yet.’

‘When?’

When, indeed?

Xenophilius slept in a little room at the top of the house stuffed with bones he’d found on forest floors and runes carved into pebbles and Pandora’s old papers, her tight little scientist’s scrawl spilling out the secrets of spells that had slept under the earth for thousands of years, rites belonging to long-dead gods, powers too vast to be summoned and recalled with a single incantation. Each day he woke and he turned these things over in his hand one after the other, the weight of them as familiar as that of his wand. Xenophilius accumulated, he catalogued, and he gave each object stories that he told himself he understood.

Sometimes, Luna felt like one of her father’s curios. She was there when he woke up, he checked her for scratches, and he put her back on the shelf when he sat down to work. He loved her like she was a bird with a broken wing: a girl to be cradled, bound up, kept in the warm. Her stillness was a constant in his flotsam-jetsam life.

Xenophilius had the Quibbler, the things he found in the dark, and his Luna. Her father built on threes. These were his Hallows. She didn’t know what he would do if one of them went away to a castle in Scotland for nine months of the year. He had lost much already.

So Luna didn’t look Ginny full in the eye when she signed: ‘I’ll tell him soon.’

‘Will you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alright.’

Ginny picked up the letter from the table, scanned it through once more. ‘In the meantime, are we going to send this off?’

Luna nodded with a certainty she did not feel. Ginny nodded back. Her eyes were alight with something more than a little dangerous.

‘When Rita Skeeter gets this, she’s just going to _scream.’_

_*_ * *

Ginny needed Luna less that summer.

Riddle’s imprint was still there, a bloodless boy’s resentments seething out of a girl still too small for her brothers’ hand-me-down robes. She began to keep her own diary. She wrote the minutiae of every day down, and on bad days she would go back and check that every hour was accounted for, that Voldemort’s ghost wasn’t still swallowing gluts of her time whole. The red, red things she had done by night pressed on her chest and drowned her mind. When Harry Potter came to stay, with his dark hair and leader’s bearing, there were moments when she would catch Riddle in him, and she would flinch.

But Ginny was not the sort of girl to let herself belong to anyone else, ghost or no ghost.

She flew often, wheeling up and up and up in a sky bigger than all the demons she had ever, would ever face. She liked storms best. She flew into the belly of lowering clouds as the rain beat her clean. The wind made a mess of her hair. Mrs Weasley tutted. Ginny smiled.

She checked herself in mirrors, relearning her Riddleless body, moving her hands just for the joy of watching her power over her own limbs. She did not hang limp and puppet-like. She stood, owning all that she was, casting protective charms over her four-poster all through the school year and daring anyone around her to ask why.

She told herself to everyone and anyone, sharing jokes and insults and truths easily, generously, because she had spent a year giving up her secrets to one half-man and his silvery lies, and she wasn’t going to let that happen again. She surrounded herself with battlements of towering noise.

Noise, which crowded Luna’s brain and wore her tired.

Luna was happy. Of course she was happy. Ginny’s raggedness last summer, her rattling breathing and her clenched fists and her watchful eyes, had broken her heart. At 13, she ached for the unkindnesses of others more than any child should. Seeing Ginny grow into herself again brought her a steady joy like the slow warming of earth in spring. She read Ginny’s misspelled letters written in stubby pencil, all the conquests, all the sallies, all the taunts that perhaps bit a little too hard, and she hummed to herself as she looked out of her small window, dreaming of flying.

The letters went in a little drawer with a clutch of oddities from their time together. A crumbling stinging nettle sprig, carried carefully home in the lap of her skirt after Ginny had run through a waist high patch just to prove that it didn’t hurt if you didn’t think about it. An iridescent feather dropped by an as-yet unidentified bird that Ginny had sworn she would search for across the whole sky on her broom. A tiny, pointed shoe Ginny had found in a hedge, which Luna was quite certain belonged to a stray gnome. A sketch of Ginny’s face in profile, unfinished, because Ginny hadn’t been able to sit still long enough.

She was her father’s daughter, after all. She accumulated, she catalogued, and she gave each object stories that she told herself she understood.

So Ginny went to the Quidditch World Cup, and she wrote Luna about fields blazing green (‘no, Luna, leprechaun bites aren’t poisonous, I asked one of the Irish’). She went to Diagon Alley, and she wrote Luna about Florean Fortescue’s Ice-Cream Parlour (‘it’s actually quite quiet sometimes. Cloudy Monday mornings. I think you’d be ok with it’). She wrote Luna short, spiky missives about Harry Potter’s small, unthinking kindnesses. She came up to the Rookery on rainy days that weren’t quite stormy enough for decent flying, and Luna never asked her why she had been away so long.

It didn’t matter. She’d see Ginny all the time, when she got to Hogwarts.

It wouldn’t be that year. For all her practising, all her homemade potions tasting of ditchwater meant to make words run smooth off her tongue, her speech was still more heavy pauses than anything else. She stumbled, she stuttered, the sounds stuck in her throat like prayers in an unbeliever’s mouth. And Hogwarts wasn’t a place for children who kept quiet. Hogwarts was common rooms bursting at the seams with chatter, the walls of the Great Hall throbbing with the school song, cheering on jinx wars in the corridors, the shriek of a spell gone wrong.

But she was getting better. She spoke aloud the names of all the shadows she saw above her bed before she slept until the taste of them was as familiar in her mouth as air. She read stories of knights and kings and questing beasts to the high summer grass, and the grass whispered back stories of green things flexing in the soil. She had a list of handy phrases (‘Hello,’ ‘How are you?’ ‘Watch out for the garbling gannet’s nest up ahead’) and she learned them by rote, five a day after supper, with more diligence than she’d ever applied to her transfiguration exercises. The muscles in her throat that had grown stiff with disuse after her mother died were creaking back to life again. She was carving out a voice for herself.

It was just a shame that Ginny wasn’t around to hear it nearly as often as she would like.

* * *

‘Go on, open it!’ Ginny said, pressing the envelope into Luna’s hand. ‘She was going on and on and on about wanting to meet you after she read the article. I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, though, so I thought she could write to you. I swear, she called you ‘fascinating’ a good 30 times.’

Ginny was back at the Rookery for a couple of hours between afternoon Quidditch matches with Harry and her brothers. They sat on the step outside the door. Ginny wouldn’t come up to Luna’s room unless she had to now; it reminded her of too many nights last summer spent in the jaws of a fear so vast she thought it would pound out of her chest. Luna was looking up at her like a drowning girl seeing the sun through the dark of the waves, like she was light and life all at once. If Ginny noticed, she was good enough not to say anything.

‘She’s… the clever girl. Isn’t. Isn’t she.’ Luna said, haltingly, roughly.

‘Hermione? She’s more than clever. She sucks in everything she reads. No one knows how she keeps it all in her head.’

Luna nodded. The silence grew heavy around them. Ginny sighed. ‘You can sign if you want, Luna. It’s ok. You can take a break.’

‘No. No. I’m. Got to. Practice.’

‘Ok. If you’re sure.’

They stayed unspeaking for a minute longer. Ginny thought back to the Gryffindor dormitory, her words darting round the room, laughing, laughing, laughing. She wondered how Luna’s quiet got to be so contagious. She shook her head to dispel the thoughts crowding round her. Luna wondered if Ginny was suffering from a case of the wrackspurts, but didn’t ask.

‘Are you going to read it or not?’

Luna opened the envelope carefully, almost gingerly, as if she thought the things that came out of this girl’s sharp mind might cut her hand. She took out the letter.

_Dear Luna,_

_I read your piece in the Prophet. It was wonderful, honestly. I don’t know how Skeeter got up the guts to print it, given everything else they’ve been absolutely dismissing recently, but I’m glad she did._ _Although I imagine you wish she hadn’t called it a ‘sweet little letter.’ If the subject ever comes up again, you might want to know (I’m sure you do already, but just in case) that nonverbal magic really has historically been a cornerstone of the community. If you wanted to survive a witch hunt in the 16 th century you couldn’t be seen to be muttering incantations under your breath, could you? There’s a subchapter on it in ‘A History of Magic.’ Perhaps you ought to refer Skeeter to it next time, though Bagshot does gloss over some crucial points about the intersection of the witch hunts with contemporary classism and racism. If you’re really interested, Rachel Ladipo has written a very comprehensive analysis in ‘Them and Us – Re-Examining Intra-Magical Discrimination and its Impact on Muggle-Led Anti-Witching Crusades.’ I can’t recommend it enough. It’s really got a sense of the narrative._

_I’m rambling on. Sorry. How are you? I hope you’re well._

_Ginny tells me you’ve taught her wizarding sign. That’s fascinating! I used to be quite good at BSL (muggle sign) myself, but I’ve lost most of it now – don’t really need it any more. The mechanics of a wizarding sign language are intriguing. I’ve read that there are signs for the runic alphabet – how does that work? Frankly, the literature on it is limited. I can’t even find a decent dictionary in the Hogwarts library, which is just ridiculous. I really would appreciate learning more, though – maybe you might be able to give me some more information? Only if you have the time, obviously._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Hermione Granger_

_P.S. I also gather from Ginny that you’ve got a permit to use a wand outside of Hogwarts, what with you being home-schooled. I was just wondering what exactly the procedure for getting the permit was like, and whether they ever gave them out to non-home-schooled underage wizards. For practice, I mean._

_P.P.S. I’m glad Ginny’s got you._

Luna smiled to herself at the last postscript. Ginny peered over her shoulder. ‘What, something funny?’

Luna pulled the letter away. ‘No. Not funny.’ She kept on smiling. ‘She does… like her words. Doesn’t she.’

‘I don’t think you’re the first to notice.’ Ginny pressed her head into Luna’s shoulder. ‘Well? Would you meet her?’

Luna fidgeted, anxious. The things she wanted to say wouldn’t come into her mouth fast enough. She turned to Ginny and signed: ‘Would you be there?’

Ginny saw the stuttering movements of Luna’s hands. They each knew what being scared looked like in the other, and they knew the little ways to get it to sink down from its tempest heights. ‘Yeah. Yeah, of course I will,’ she signed.

Luna exhaled, signed: ‘Could you ask her to bring the book she wrote about?’

* * *

Luna sat on the steps leading up to the door of the Rookery, leg bouncing up and down. She watched as Ginny waved from the path, trailing a tall girl with a puffed-up cloud of afro and a smile that wasn’t quite certain enough to mask its nervousness.

‘Luna! Luna, hi!’ Ginny was running to meet her now, and Luna knew she was supposed to get up, and smile, and wave, but the host of muscles in her body required to do those things wouldn’t listen to her just at that moment.

It was the last day of summer. Tomorrow, Ginny would be off on the Hogwarts Express, and words would flit from her tongue like quick, glittering birds, and people Luna had never seen would throng round her to listen. And Luna would be up in her room, feeding breadcrumbs to the jam-jars of plimpies on her windowsill.

‘This is Hermione,’ Ginny said. ‘Hermione – Luna.’ Hermione shifted forwards. ‘Hello,’ she said, with a little awkward half-wave.

Luna groped in the dark of her mind for a reply. She knew she was gaping, fish-gaping, idiot-gaping, and she knew Ginny was watching, but she couldn’t push out the right sounds.

‘Are you alright?’ Hermione asked. Her voice was deeper, richer than Luna had expected, like earth warmed all day under the sun.

‘She’s fine,’ Ginny said quickly. ‘She’s fine, it’s just – you’re new, she’s adjusting –’

‘Right, no, of course. Would it help if I –’ She gestured to Ginny, but Luna’s brain was too tangled to figure out what these too-fast movements might mean.

‘Yeah. Yeah, I think it would,’ Ginny said.

‘Ok.’ She turned back to Luna, and slowly, with jerking, untrained hands, she began to sign: ‘Hi, Luna. How are you? Can I help?’

Luna frowned, uncomprehending. ‘Ginny taught me some basics. And I did a bit of research.’ She signed again: ‘Can I help?’

Luna looked up at this girl, her watchful eyes, her hungry mind, her quiet concern. She gave Hermione the slightest sliver of a smile.

‘No, thank you. I’ll be fine,’ she signed. ‘Sorry, could you just do that again? I’m not sure I got everything, I haven’t done tenses yet –’ Hermione said. Ginny laughed, and Luna wanted her never to stop. ‘I’ll translate.’

* * *

The three of them sat hunched round the front steps. Hermione was speaking so fast, it was as if she thought the words would slip away from her entirely if she didn’t gasp them out. ‘Frankly, it baffles me that they only teach nonverbal magic in sixth year. It’s such a critical skill, and honestly it’s not especially difficult to pick up, so long as you’re not already stuck in established patterns of verbal magic.’

‘Maybe for you,’ Ginny said.

‘No, not “maybe for me.” I mean it. All of us were performing nonverbal magic before we got to Hogwarts – sorry, Luna, I mean, before we were eleven. It’s just a matter of honing it. Really, the verbalization of magic only came with the establishing of an intellectual magical elite –’

‘Please, Hermione, I’m on holiday,’ said Ginny, leaning back against the wall.

‘There’s actually a monastic order in Ireland dedicated to the cultivation of nonverbal magic. Apparently they spend an hour every morning with their ears pressed to the floor to hear the “earth’s natural unspoken magic,” but I’m pretty sure that’s an urban myth.’

‘I bet it’s not. There’s all kinds of weird wizarding colonies up in Ireland. Dad’s told me. “The Order of Scarab-Beetle-Deducers” and stuff.’

‘Actually, the scarab-beetle-deducers have published a lot of very interesting work. Daddy ran an article in the Quibbler.’ Luna signed. Ginny translated with a rueful grin.

‘Well, whatever’s happening in Ireland, nonverbal magic is absolutely essential. Honestly, I thought I’d be pretty much relying on it a while ago.’

Ginny stood up. ‘Luna, is it ok if I go find the loo inside?’ Luna’s eyes were wide, but Ginny was already at the door. ‘I’ll only be a minute. Promise. You’ve got your pad, right?’ Luna fished her notebook out of the back pocket of her jeans. ‘See? You’ll be fine. Don’t say anything too interesting.’

Hermione and Luna sat in a silence as heavy as the August heat around them. Luna fidgeted, pulling out hanks of grass, nibbling at her nails. After a few minutes she scribbled in the notebook, mostly because it was something to do with her hands, then thrust it towards Hermione: ‘What do you mean, “I thought I’d have to rely on nonverbal magic?”’

‘Oh. Oh, well,’ Hermione said, handing the book back to Luna. ‘I suppose it’s just that, well. When I was younger I had this terrible stutter, just really awful, and whenever I tried to say anything I felt like I was tripping up on my teeth. And, well, understandably, I got… teased. My school wasn’t very nice. So I suppose I sort of… became quiet for a few years. That’s when I learned BSL. But after a lot – I mean a _lot –_ of speech therapy, it got… manageable, pretty much. People barely noticed it at Hogwarts. Only, I was always scared it would come back. And then, well, when my voice broke, I thought I’d start getting quiet all over again –’

She looked up, clocked Luna’s frown, her obvious bafflement. ‘Oh. Oh. Did Ginny not – did Ginny not tell you I was trans?’

Luna shook her head. She wrote: ‘I’m sorry.’ Hermione gave a thin little half-smile. ‘Don’t worry. I know she thinks I’ll get… offended if she talks about it. I won’t, but. Still. Good intentions, and such. And I suppose it’s – flattering, really. That you didn’t notice.’

Luna wrote again: ‘I’m not always so good at noticing.’

‘I’m sure it’s not that. I’ve just – well, I’ve got handy with a lot of image spells over the years. Semi-permanent concealment charms, that sort of thing. Angelina Johnson taught me a spell just at the end of last term that actually stops stubble sticking to your face. Sort of an automatic shave. But I don’t really bother with voice-altering charms any more. They make my throat itch.’

Luna wrote: ‘I think your voice is lovely.’

‘That’s very kind of you to say,’ Hermione said. She beamed at Luna, a real full-fledged unfaltering grin, and signed: ‘Thank you.’

Both of them jerked round as Ginny came through the door and stretched out on the grass. ‘I’m back,’ she said, ‘Did you miss me terribly?’

* * *

Luna said goodbye to Ginny early the next morning. By mid-afternoon she was standing behind Xenophilius’ chair as he scrawled in the margins of an article on the restorative powers of Loch Ness water, a little stiller, a little more tightly clenched, than he liked to see his girl be.

Luna loved watching Xenophilius work on days like this, when the world rushed against her like a riptide and pressed her into silence. She loved the steady scratch of his quill against the parchment, the low Gregorian chant melodies he hummed to himself as he wrote, the whistling of the kettle in the corner. She knew these sounds, their rhythms, their constancy. She certainly knew they wouldn’t vanish off to Hogwarts for the best part of a year and leave her alone with nothing but the creatures she saw out of the corner of her eye and her own twisting thoughts.

Xenophilius listened to the shallowness of her breathing, barely a hair’s breadth away from a sob, and he twisted round in his chair. ‘How are you doing, Luna, love?’ He signed.

‘Fine, daddy.’

‘Are you?’

‘I’ll be alright.’

Xenophilius sighed. ‘You’re allowed to miss a friend, you know.’

‘I know,’ Luna signed. ‘It’s probably just nargles, though.’

He smiled, pushing his pink-feathered spectacles up to his forehead. ‘Very probably, love. And we’ve got tonics for that, haven’t we?’

‘Yes, daddy.’

‘I’ll get the dirigible plums, then.’

  



End file.
